Service one-pager
The sales flier — one service, one page, one call to action.
The card, the signature, and the social artwork all carry the brand in a few
square centimetres. The one-pager is the opposite problem: a whole page,
handed over or attached, that has to explain a single service to someone who has
not asked yet.
One service per sheet
A one-pager describes one offer. A sheet listing four services is a
capabilities brochure, and it is read by nobody, because a reader who wants one
of the four has to find it first.
If there are four services, there are four one-pagers. They share the structure
below and differ only in their content — which is what makes the structure worth
specifying.
The bands
Four horizontal bands, top to bottom. The sheet is 1000px wide in the HTML
source and prints to a single A4 or Letter page.
| Band | Fill | Job |
|---|
| Header | midnight-9 | Wordmark, an overline naming the artefact, the service name at display size, and one sentence of promise |
| Benefits | white | Three columns: icon in a tinted tile, a short heading, two lines of body |
| Process | white | A numbered horizontal sequence — the steps, with a duration under each |
| Close | midnight-12 | The one-line commitment, the contact route, and one accent button |
Two midnight bands, at the top and the bottom, with white between them. The
sheet opens and closes on the brand and leaves the middle to the content — the
same shape as a title-and-closer
deck, for the same reason.
The header carries a single decorative element: an orange-9 circle at 6%
opacity bleeding off the top-right corner. That is the entire ornament budget for
the page.
Three benefits, not five
Three columns fit a 12-column grid at four columns each, three items are
readable at a glance, and three is roughly how many distinct reasons a person
retains from a page they were handed.
Each benefit is an icon tile, a heading of no more than five words, and body text
of no more than two lines. The icon is
Lucide at 20px inside a 40px tile
filled with the tag background — it is a marker, not an illustration.
The heading states the benefit, not the feature: “Self-hosted where it matters”,
not “Self-hosting support”.
The process band
A numbered sequence with a connecting rule, each step carrying a duration. The
durations are the point: a one-pager that says “we migrate your cloud” competes
on adjectives, and one that says “week 3: stand up self-hosted core” competes on
a plan.
The numbers are set in IBM Plex Mono inside midnight-9 discs, because they are
data. The connector is a 1px slate-5 rule, not an arrow — the numbers already
carry the direction.
Do not put a duration on the sheet that the engagement cannot hold. The
portfolio principle — make maturity
and limitations easier to see, not harder — applies to sales collateral without
modification.
One call to action
The close band gets one accent element. It is a button shape carrying white text,
so it fills with accent-solid (#cc4528) and not the identity accent — the
same 4.72:1 rule as the interface
and the email.
Beside it, exactly one contact route, in mono. Two routes make the reader choose
before they act.
Printing it
The example is HTML, and the export path is the browser’s print dialogue — the
same route as the resume
template.
- Colour is not guaranteed. A one-pager is frequently reprinted on an office
mono laser. The layout must survive greyscale: the bands separate by value,
the numbers stay legible, and no meaning is carried by the accent alone.
- Turn on background graphics in the print dialogue, or the midnight bands
print as white and the reversed text disappears.
- Check the fold. If the sheet will be folded, nothing important sits within
10mm of the fold line.
- For volume print, hand the vendor the
CMYK values rather than the
hex.
Do
Keep one service per sheet, three benefits, and one call to action. Put real
durations on the process steps. Check it in greyscale before it is printed.
Don't
List a service catalogue, use stock photography of people in meetings, add a
second contact route, or promise a timeline the engagement cannot hold.